(Press-News.org) A Yale study of the care quality received at safety-net hospitals — which provide care for the majority of uninsured and other vulnerable populations — found that quality at these facilities is similar to non-safety-net hospitals. This is despite the unique financial challenges at safety-net hospitals in the face of rising costs and the potential impact of the health care law.
Published in the August issue of Health Affairs, the study was conducted by Elizabeth E. Drye, M.D., of the Yale Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, Joseph S. Ross, M.D., assistant professor of internal medicine at Yale School of Medicine; and colleagues. The team found that mortality and readmission outcomes for illnesses like heart failure, acute myocardial infarction, and pneumonia, were effectively identical at safety-net and non-safety-net hospitals in urban metro areas.
Safety-net hospitals — which include both public and private urban hospitals with high Medicaid caseloads serving large numbers of low-income, uninsured, and otherwise vulnerable populations — have historically faced greater financial strains than hospitals serving more affluent populations. This financial burden was thought to negatively affect patient death rates and readmissions, which are commonly used as indicators of care quality.
The team studied a population that included fee-for-service Medicare patients age 65 or older who were hospitalized between Jan. 1, 2006, and Dec. 31, 2008, with acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, or pneumonia. They then compared death and readmission rates at both kinds of hospitals.
"Based on these findings, safety-net hospitals are performing better than many would have expected," said Ross. "We were surprised to find that mortality and readmission rates were broadly similar across urban areas for both safety-net and non-safety-net hospitals, with differences, on average, of less than one percentage point across these three conditions. For heart failure mortality, there was no difference between the two kinds of hospitals."
The results suggest that safety-net hospitals have the potential to achieve equal, or even better, outcomes than do non-safety-net hospitals, notes Drye. "By expanding insurance coverage, the newly enacted health care law should help safety-net hospitals attain even lower readmission and mortality rates," she said.
INFORMATION:Other authors on the study include Susannah M. Bernheim, Zhenqiu Lin, Jersey Chen, Sharon-Lise T. Normand, and Harlan M. Krumholz.
The study is supported by the National Institute on Aging; the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; the American Federation of Aging Research; the National Institute on Aging; and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
OAKLAND, Calif., August 6, 2012 – Long-term use of commonly used blood pressure medications that increase sensitivity to sunlight is associated with an increased risk of lip cancer in non-Hispanic whites, according to a Kaiser Permanente study that appears in the current online issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.
Funded by the National Cancer Institute, the study found that photosensitizing antihypertensive drugs such as nifedipine and hydrochlorothiazide were associated with cancer of the epithelial cells known as squamous cells—which are the main part of the outermost ...
Implantable cardioverter defibrillators account for one-third of the decrease in cardiac arrests caused by ventricular fibrillation in North-Holland, according to research in Circulation, an American Heart Association journal.
VF is an abnormal heart rhythm that makes the heart quiver so it can't pump blood.
ICDs are small electronic devices implanted in the chest that detect potentially fatal abnormal heart rhythms and try to stop them with electric shocks. Generally, only people with a high risk of sudden cardiac death — mostly those at high risk of abnormal heartbeats ...
Hospitals in areas with large minority populations are more likely to be overcrowded and to divert ambulances, delaying timely emergency care, according to a multi-institutional study focused on California.
The researchers examined ambulance diversion in more than 200 hospitals around the state to assess whether overcrowding in emergency rooms disproportionately affects racial and ethnic minorities. They found that minorities are more at risk of being impacted by ER crowding and by diversion than non-minorities.
The study will be published in the August issue of Health ...
Most earthquakes in the Barnett Shale region of north Texas occur within a few miles of one or more injection wells used to dispose of wastes associated with petroleum production such as hydraulic fracturing fluids, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin. None of the quakes identified in the two-year study were strong enough to pose a danger to the public.
The study by Cliff Frohlich, senior research scientist at the university's Institute for Geophysics, appears this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"You ...
AMHERST, Mass. – By some estimates, a third of the Earth's organisms by mass live in our planet's rocks and sediments, yet their lives and ecology are almost a complete mystery. This week, microbiologist James Holden at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and others report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the first detailed data about a group of methane-exhaling microbes that live deep in the cracks of hot undersea volcanoes.
Holden says, "Evidence has built over the past 20 years that there's an incredible amount of biomass in the Earth's subsurface, ...
Baltimore, MD — The study of muscular system protein myostatin has been of great interest to researchers as a potential therapeutic target for people with muscular disorders. Although much is known about how myostatin affects muscle growth, there has been disagreement about what types of muscle cells it acts upon. New research from a team including Carnegie's Chen-Ming Fan and Christoph Lepper narrows down the field to one likely type of cell. Their work is published the week of August 6 by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Myostatin is known to inhibit ...
ITHACA, N.Y. – A colorful, fruit-eating bird with a black mask, pale belly and scarlet breast – never before described by science – has been discovered and named by Cornell University graduates following an expedition to the remote Peruvian Andes.
The Sira Barbet, Capito fitzpatricki, is described in a paper published in the July 2012 issue of The Auk, the official publication of the American Ornithologists' Union.
The new species was discovered during a 2008 expedition led by Michael G. Harvey, Glenn Seeholzer and Ben Winger, young ornithologists who had recently graduated ...
Using just an upgraded desktop computer equipped with a relatively inexpensive graphics processing card, a team of computer scientists and biochemists at the University of California, San Diego, has developed advanced GPU accelerated software and demonstrated for the first time that this approach can sample biological events that occur on the millisecond timescale.
These results have the potential to bring millisecond scale sampling, now available only on a multi-million dollar supercomputer, to all researchers, and could significantly impact the study of protein dynamics ...
MINNEAPOLIS (August 6, 2012) – University of Minnesota School of Public Health researchers have found that medical group practices can reduce costs for patients with diabetes by investing in improved quality of care.
In the study, which appears in the August issue of Health Affairs, University of Minnesota researchers analyzed 234 medical group practices providing care for more than 133,000 diabetic patients. After developing a "quality of care" score based on select patient care initiatives, researchers found that medical providers saved an average of $51 in health ...
In a large epidemiologic study, researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Cancer Center found that the children of U.S.-born Latina women are at higher risk of having retinoblastoma, a malignant tumor of the retina which typically occurs in children under six.
The study, which focused on babies born in California, also found that offspring of older fathers were at greater risk for retinoblastoma, as were children born to women with sexually transmitted diseases and those born in multiple births, which may indicate an increased risk from in vitro fertilization. Those findings confirmed ...
